Huge ice chunk lands on Columbia roof

WEST COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) – One West Columbia family thought the sky was falling when a big ice chunk fell on their house. And it may not have been from mother nature.

“My husband flew down the steps and we just were like, ‘what was that noise?’ And my husband said, ‘did a car or something hit the house?’ And I said, ‘no it came from the roof.’ ‘Did the bookshelves fall? Did the attic cave in?'” recalls Nora Drabb.

Sunday afternoon Nora Drabb was in her kitchen preparing dinner for her family. That’s when she says they heard a noise she’s never heard before.

“It was very loud! It was so loud,” she says. “That’s when I thought something fell off an airplane. Did a wing fall off an airplane? It was so loud. Then if a wing fell off an airplane is it now going to crash somewhere?”

She says her nephew looked out the window and saw white debris falling off the side of the roof.

“And when we ran outside there was a piece of ice. The biggest ice was the size of a basketball or volleyball. And when it hit the roof it just exploded all over the back yard,” she says.

Nora says the crashing noise was a big ice chunk crashing on her roof. But why did a ice chunk fall mysteriously from the sky?

Nora and her family live less than three miles from the Columbia airport.

“If it was a plane, in fact, then it wasn’t close because we hear them fly over our house all the time and we heard nothing,” she says.

This may sound like an isolated incident, but the Federal Aviation Administration says they have investigated cases like this before.

The FAA says a bad valve in a plane’s lavatory has been known to leak. For now Nora is playing it safe, in case anything else decides to mysteriously fall from the sky.

“I’m afraid to let my kids go in the backyard because if they would have been out there somebody would have got hurt,” she says.